The top down these three people decide everything can lead to abuse or neglect. Most importantly it makes people do irrational personal things to win over the top three. This leads to internal cults.
That strategy should start by considering the things that cannot be changed (legislation like GDPR, maybe scalability, availability of resource, or health and safety regulations).
The leaders would then consider mutable factors, things they DO control like number of employees, technology options, business model, geographic location.
These two broad things (immutable and mutable factors) will lead to a list of things that need doing to achieve world domination. Sorry, I mean success.
That list of tasks is handed off to employees who will repeat a similar process within their areas at a more granular level.
Good reporting up and down the chain allows people at all levels of the organization to adjust course when needed, with a level of autonomy suited to whatever level you're in within the organization.
If the organisation is small enough people at the bottom may will seek out people at the top for direction.
No cult required.
Good reporting up and down the chain allows people at all levels of the organization to adjust course when needed, with a level of autonomy suited to whatever level you're in within the organization."
Yeah this is the part that is missing at shopify from my experience. And it has caused all sorts of brutal problems and mental health issues for people.
You can give every engineer and team complete freedom, and you’ll end up with too many microservices to count, with ineffective higher level strategic alignment. The result? Horrible environment to get the things that matters done. Little upside for your stock.
Stop thinking of VPs and executives as harmful gatekeepers. Done right, they add incredible value to the business, and incredible value to your output as an employee. Done wrong though, yes, find another company; just as you should if engineering is dysfunctional.
If my company’s executives threw up their hands, and decided to stop doing their jobs and tell every team to solve whatever, I will look for another job immediately.